Page:Early Essays by George Eliot (1919).djvu/24

 misanthropist, all compact of bitter sarcasm, and therefore no poet. As it was, he was a humourist—one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity. While he laughed at the follies of men, he wept over their sorrows; and while his wit lashed them as with a whip of scorpions, there was a stream of feeling in the deep caverns of his soul, which was all the time murmuring, "Would that I could die for thee, thou poor humanity!"

From the age of twenty, I never knew him to form a particular predilection for any individual, or admit any new intimacy. He seemed to have learned by experience that his sensibility was too acute for special friendship—that his sympathy with mankind was that of a being of analogous, rather than of identical race. Even animals, which usually attract those who are cut off by any material or immaterial barrier from their own kind, seemed to have a repulsion for him. He was their zealous protector, it is true, and I have known him walk back a hundred yards to give a consolatory pat on the head to an ugly cur, which he thought he had repulsed too unkindly; though all the while feeling the direst aversion to the ill-favoured brute. He seemed, 18